The present invention relates to inspecting the quality of moving images such as videos or motion pictures. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for detecting a shot of short time duration inserted in a moving image stored on video tape or a video disc, and displaying a representative image of the shot of short time duration.
Due to the popularity of satellite broadcasting, cable television and the like, in addition to existing television broadcasting, the number of broadcasting channels have steadily increased. If a wide-band communications infrastructure called an "Information Highway" is established in the future, broadcasting will be easy to carry out. Thus, far more industrialists will take part in the broadcasting industry than do today further accelerating the increase in the number of broadcasting channels. With such a large amount of information being broadcasted it is possible that some of the information may contain illegal images which are intended to manipulate people. For example, there is a known phenomena called "Subliminal Suggestion" which is intended for illegal psychological manipulation of an audience. Subliminal suggestion is accomplished by inserting special images of extremely short time duration into a moving image. It is thought that subliminal suggestion is capable of subconsciously influencing an audience to perform a suggested act without the audience being aware that such a suggestion has occurred. For this reason, it is necessary to determine whether each program to be broadcast contains subliminal suggestion information and prevent broadcasting of such program. However, according to conventional technology, it is necessary to manually inspect a moving image while feeding it on a frame-by-frame basis. Thus, even if the moving image can be inspected at a rate of one frame per second, at least 48 hours would be required to inspect an entire 2-hour motion picture. As a result, it is physically impossible to inspect every program to be broadcast.